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Entropy Demystified: The Second Law Reduced to Plain Common Sense
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| Part No: | 9812832254 |
| Manufacturer: | World Scientific Publishing Company |
| MFG Part: | |
| Customer Rating: | 4.5 / 5.0 |
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In this unique book, the reader is invited to experience the joy of appreciating something which has eluded understanding for many years -- entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. The book has a two-pronged message: first, that the second law is not infinitely incomprehensible as commonly stated in most textbooks on thermodynamics, but can, in fact, be comprehended through sheer common sense; and second, that entropy is not a mysterious quantity that has resisted understanding but a simple, familiar and easily comprehensible concept. Written in an accessible style, the book guides the reader through an abundance of dice games and examples from everyday life. The author paves the way for readers to discover for themselves what entropy is, how it changes, and, most importantly, why it always changes in one direction in a spontaneous process. In this new edition, seven simulated games are included so that the reader can actually experiment with the games described in the book. These simulated games are meant to enhance the readers understanding and sense of joy upon discovering the second law of thermodynamics. Contents: Programs for Simulating Some of the Games in the Book; Introduction, and a Short History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; A Brief Introduction to Probability Theory, Information Theory, and All the Rest; First Let Us Play with Real Dice; Let s Play with Simplified Dice and Have a Preliminary Grasp of the Second Law; Experience the Second Law with All Your Five Senses; Finally, Grasp It with Your Common Sense; Translating from the Dice-World to the Real World; Reflections on the Status of the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a Law of Physics.
| A book to be read | 2010-02-28 | 5 / 5 |
| This book is for everyone who has heard about entropy, but who cannot understand what it is, thinking it is something mysterious and impossible to understand.
This book will show you a way to get closer to the second law of thermodynamics (a protagonist of this law is entropy!), using nothing but common sense and math at a very low level.
Well, this is a book to be read, full of examples that help the reader to grasp all the key concepts hidden in this book.Have fun! |
| A Common Sense Approach to Entropy | 2010-02-11 | 5 / 5 |
| | In this easy-to-read book, the author explains the nature of entropy using vary basic probabilistic arguments. The author assumes that the reader knows no mathematics, nor has any knowledge of physics but can use ordinary common sense in reasoning things out. Most of the arguments make use of dice and coins until near the end where real systems, e.g., gasses, are discussed. The writing style is very clear, authoritative, highly accessible and friendly. Some concepts and conclusions are deliberately repeated; this can be quite useful to readers who are new to this subject. The book's level is very basic and could be easily understood by any interested general reader or high school student. |
| "Demythifying" the mystery of entropy | 2010-02-02 | 5 / 5 |
| If you have ever felt intimidated by the myth on the incomprehensibility of entropy, this book is for you. If you have a good understanding of what entropy is but find it difficult to communicate its meaning to non-specialists, this book is also for you.
Traditionally, entropy has enjoyed the "reputation" among common people and young students of being a mysterious and elusive quantity. Good students know that it is "something" that never decreases in an isolated system (second law of thermodynamics), and thus it is intrinsically linked to the concept of irreversibility. At the level of thermodynamics, as a phenomenological theory, the second law is an axiom and the entropy change between two equilibrium states at the same temperature is defined as the hypothetical heat the system would have absorbed, were the actual process be replaced by an infinitely slow one (so all the intermediate states can be considered in equilibrium), divided by the temperature.
The realization that ordinary matter is made of a huge number of microscopic entities (atoms and molecules) and the advent of statistical mechanics allowed for a deeper understanding of what entropy actually is. Entropy is not but a measure (in logarithmic scale) of the number of different "detailed" states (microstates) that are compatible with a given "coarse-grained" state (or macrostate). In a simple gas, for instance, a microstate (in a non-quantum description) implies the specification of the velocities and spatial locations of every single molecule. One would need about one thousand billion (10^12) 1-Terabyte hard drives to store the information contained in just one microstate. On the other hand, a macrostate is specified by just a few variables, say the number of moles, the volume of the container, and the total energy. Needless to say, each individual macrostate can be accessed from a (huge) number of different microstates. The entropy assigned to a given macrostate is essentially (the logarithm of) the number of distinct microstates that are accessible to it.
Information theory (developed by Shannon in the late forties of the past century and applied to statistical mechanics by Jaynes ten years later) provides an insightful view of the entropy concept. Imagine I pick up a particular microstate out of all the repertoire of microstates belonging to a given macrostate. I show you only the macrostate (or repertoire of microstates) and challenge you to foretell which specific microstate I chose. Of course, you would complain that very many possible microstates are compatible with the known macrostate and thus the information I gave you is incomplete. Well, the entropy of the macrostate is precisely a measure of that missing information. To help you find out my concealed microstate, I allow you to ask binary (yes/no) questions. The optimal number of questions you would ask to narrow the number of possibilities until you succeed in unveiling my chosen microstate is again (proportional to) the entropy of the macrostate.
The above paragraphs might seem too technical and expressed with too much jargon to many laypeople. The great merit of Ben-Naim's little book, however, is to lead the reader to discover the meaning of entropy by him/herself in an entertaining way. This is done, with a delicious prose that avoids any technicalities, by carefully designing simple dice games before the reader is seamlessly led to real-world physical and chemical processes. The author puts much emphasis in that the reader grasps not only what entropy is but, more importantly, why it grows in isolated systems, thus stripping the second law of thermodynamics of any halo of mystery.
While the information-theory approach to the concept of entropy is not certainly new, Ben-Naim amply succeeds in making it the leitmotiv of this popularization work without incurring in superficial banalities. This is why this book is also useful to knowledgeable scientists with a desire to reinforce their understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts permeating so many branches of science. |
| A book for lay audience | 2010-01-25 | 5 / 5 |
| Entropy is a concept that not only lends itself to different interpretation, it also lends itself to strong feelings and opinions. This latter aspect is reflected in some of the reviews of this book.
That, however, is a distraction. The aim of my colleague and friend Professor Ben Naim's aim this book is to show to non scientist that the mystery can be removed from the entropy concept by deconvoluting the meaning of the equation on Boltzmann's grave and on the cover of the book (S= k log W). This deconvolution takes place through small steps involving no more than high-school mathematics. For scientists, the deconvolution may have taken too many steps; for the 'lay' audience, I think the taking of 'baby steps' helps reinforce the understanding. While for many scientists the reaction may be 'of course - what else is new?' for non-scientists this book should be quite revealing.
The secondary message of the book is the brief recapitulation of the more technical proposition, expounded in a different, technical book (A Farewell To Entropy), that the concept of entropy and its customary association with order/disorder should be replaced by the concept of 'missing information' since, unlike order/disorder, it can be defined rigorously. Clearly, this is radical a proposition that goes against many established concepts, but arguing about this should be done in the context of that book and in technical terms, and not when discussing this book. |
| Curious about entropy but have a limited mathematical background? This book is for you. | 2010-01-21 | 5 / 5 |
| If you are curious about the meaning of entropy, but are not sure that you have the complete mathematical background to understand it, this book is for you. An enjoyment of popular science and basic mathematical skills are all that's needed. The magic of Arieh Ben-Naim is that he unifies a deep understanding of science with an ability to communicate difficult concepts to a general audience. Ben-Naim writes:
1. The Second Law [of never decreasing entropy] is basically a law of probability [as Boltzmann established].
2. The laws of probability are basically the laws of common
sense [as Laplace realized].
3. It follows from (1) and (2) that the Second Law is basically a law of common sense - nothing more.
The book includes a short review of probability and information theory necessary to understand entropy.
If you are puzzled by the meaning of entropy, you are not alone. Millions of engineers calculate entropy changes and design industrial processes without the slightest intuitive understanding of its meaning. The situation is not much better among specialists in statistical thermodynamics, where many hold wrong views about entropy being a form of energy. In this book, the connection between the number of states of a system and the essential nature of entropy as a measure of information is clarified.
The reader who is interested in a more rigorous treatment of entropy should consult the book A Farewell To Entropy, by the same author.
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